TOXLINE® Unified

A
new version of the National Library of Medicine® (NLM) TOXLINE was released on TOXNET on Tuesday, July 18 (see Figure 1). Search results from the two parts of TOXLINE®, TOXLINE Core and TOXLINE Special, are now merged. TOXLINE Core was the PubMed®/MEDLINE® toxicology subset and TOXLINE Special captured other literature (special journal and other research literature, technical reports and research projects, and archival materials). This change allows all results to be relevancy ranked in the same way, with results displayed in only one window (see Figure 2). A similar merged interface will be provided for the Developmental and Reproductive Toxicology/Environmental Teratology Information Center (DART®/ETIC) database in the Fall.

TOXNET offers features such as relevancy ranking and flexible sorting and downloading options. Relevancy ranking attempts to determine which documents are most pertinent to the search, and to place those documents first in the list of results. The ranking is based upon the number of individual search terms occurring in a document, the number of times each search term occurs in a document, its rarity within the database, and the nearness of search terms to each other. Documents containing combinations of search words tend to be ranked higher than documents having isolated occurrences of the words.